If we accept the premise that people judge their own happiness by comparing to the people they see, social media has obviously complicated the picture for most people. Twenty years ago, there were “celebrities”, the people on TV, in movies, in magazines, and so on, and then there were the people you interacted with every day. Due to the natural limitations of airtime, movie release schedules, and magazine publication schedules, there was effectively a “carrying capacity” of celebrities for a given culture.

Social media, once it evolved past reciprocal “friend” relationships on Facebook to one-directional “following” relationships, first on Twitter, then Facebook and Instagram, allowed a new kind of celebrity, someone with millions of followers without a paying “celebrity job” (movie, TV, modeling contract or sponsorship of some kind). Now, instead of being a sharp divide between ordinary people and celebrities, influencers make up a gradient of everyone from the wannabe star you knew in high school with 100 followers up to C-list actors with hundreds of millions of followers. Knowing where to draw the circle of people with whom to compare yourself is much harder because of this gradient.

Enter stoicism, minimalism, essentialism, buddhism, whatever you call the quest for a content, satisfying life with the resources actually at your disposal. They might have been helpful in the past. But it seems like they are needed now more than ever in understanding why ignoring the gradient is prerequisite to a good life.

I love it when I find independent corroboration for some idea I’ve arrived at on my own. The other night I said something about how I was starting to think I needed to find a way to start caring less about politics. Well, it turns out that Arthur Brooks’s latest column was about exactly this topic, and he’s been looking at actual data:

I found that people who were “very interested in politics” were about 8 percentage points more likely to be “not very happy” about life than people who were “not very interested” in politics.

In addition, being too interested in politics impairs one’s social relationships, including with family (Brooks says says that after the 2016 election, one in six Americans stopped talking to at least one friend or family member. That’s appalling, but not particularly surprising.

One of the things that has made me hesitate to disengage from politics was the vague sense that this would leave me less aware somehow; that it was important for me to pay close attention to what’s happening in the world. But it seems I had it backwards:

Finally, retreating too far into one’s own political bubble makes one more ignorant of the world. A 2012 survey conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University asked a sample of Americans about their news-consumption habits, and quizzed them about U.S. and international political and economic events. They found that those watching the most partisan television news sources—on both the left and the right—were often less knowledgeable about world events than those who consumed no news at all.

(He does specify “partisan” news sources, but I’m not sure what that would exclude.)

I don’t know how easy I will find it to follow this advice, especially since so many other people insist on bringing politics into everything. But I think I need to try.

On the subject of keeping in touch, I have to disagree (sort of) with one of Ben’s points. He wrote that when a friend moves away, there are two alternatives: “Is it better to try to keep a thread alive? Or just say goodbye and move on? Before Facebook of course, the second option would be the only one.”

Well, that’s not exactly true. Before Facebook, we could try to keep a friendship alive with e-mails or phone calls. (And in the pre-Internet days, even letters sent through the mail.) But in practice, this almost never worked. Even if both parties were motivated to keep the relationship going, they would run out of things to say. Without any new shared experiences to talk about, they could only reminisce, and that gets old pretty quickly.

It may seem that Facebook changed this reality, but it really didn’t. What Facebook did was to create an illusion that you stay in touch with someone you never see in person, because you see their posts online, and they see yours. But there’s usually no interaction beyond occasional likes and comments. It’s just as empty and meaningless as the pre-Facebook version. The only difference is that Facebook allows you to fool yourself into thinking that the friendship is still alive. It’s a pleasant delusion, but it’s not real.

James Altucher’s essay about New York got a lot of attention . . . including death threats. He also came under attack from Jerry Seinfeld, who called him a putz in a New York Times op-ed. But Altucher isn’t impressed, and he’s standing his ground.

I’ve been thinking about our discussion last week about “staying in touch” with old friends via Facebook, and the fact that being vaguely aware of the life updates from old acquaintances seems important but doesn’t seem to have any meaningful impact on actual life.

This is coming to mind because it’s playing out in slow motion right now. We’ve got two friends that Steph and I have made over the past few years through shooting matches together. They have been some of the more interesting characters we’ve met in our time in the hobby: they’re a husband and wife, here on assignment from the Bundeswehr. Their three year assignment is up this month and they will be going back to Germany.

I’ve friended them on Facebook, but does that reproduce anything close to the experience of shooting a match together?

Obviously not.

The natural instinct is to “stay in touch” anyway, as though it’s better to try to cling to a sliver of the past few years of getting to shoot matches together. But if that time is over, because of the factors of life, is it better to try to keep a thread alive? Or just say goodbye and move on?

Before Facebook of course, the second option would be the only one. Now we have another. But is it any better? To use your question Bob, does it actually make life better?

As if on cue from our discussion Wednesday about bands that define their own genre, my pick Coheed and Cambria go and release a track that is just hard to describe.

In the past 18 years, Coheed and Cambria have put out 8 studio albums, all but one of which are a giant concept album set in sci-fi setting with songs that document dramatic moments in the story. The full story is told in comic books and novels, but honestly I haven’t read any of them and I don’t know that they’re really important to enjoy the music.

(Their best known track is “Welcome Home” but if you want one song that shows off the best of their sound, “Ten Speed” is a favorite of mine.)

But then they, with Rick Springfield’s blessing and guest appearance, put out a very much out-of-concept “sequel” to the song Jessie’s Girl:

Why you ask? Why else. They got bored in quarantine and thought it would be fun.

Spoiler alert: the narrator ends up with Jessie’s girl after all and it doesn’t work out well.

Interesting article.

One thing I think that Altucher is right about is that the pandemic will cause unsustainable institutions to collapse all at once. In this case, the finances of NYC as well as the economics of Broadway for the actors and techies. Nobody is paid well enough relative to cost of living to be able to weather a storm like this.

(I also hope that this enough of a wakeup call to my generation that people start learning to keep an emergency fund around. People who say “I can always cut back my expenses when things look bad” have just been shown an object lesson why that won’t work. Ditto for businesses. We haven’t had a bad recession since 2007 and some non-zero number of businesses will fail because they got complacent and expected the good times never to end.)

Secondly, things like saying “The hot dog stands outside of Lincoln Center? Finished.” Perhaps those individual vendors will go bust and leave the city, but as soon as people come back, someone will be there to sell them hot dogs (and assuming there is not some institutional or cultural hot dog selling knowledge lost in the change, be indistinguishable from the old guys).

Thirdly, as much as I hate to say it, I am not convinced that remote work actually is equal in productivity. At the very least I will say it is not quite yet. Altucher’s section F rests on this being true: “And you can be just as productive, make the same salary, have higher quality of life with a cheaper cost to live.”

There have been small companies that have operated on a remote basis for years (Basecamp being the perhaps the most famous of course). But we have never seen an organization of the size of Facebook or Google do it. Maybe they’ll have some data that show that people are as productive remotely as they were in the office. But I think that is by no means a foregone conclusion.

I will say for me personally, as disciplined as I am as a person, there have definitely been days when I have been more distracted at home than I would have been in a comparatively boring office. I would postulate that efficiency is hurt by remote work inversely proportional to the quality of the leadership and whether the work is interesting. I think a well-led team that believes they are making meaningful contributions to an important project will probably work just as hard from home, because they have strong internal motivation. But if they aren’t really motivated by the team or the work, it becomes much easier to be distracted five minutes at a time. So I think the companies with the most rote, uninteresting work or the weakest leadership will disproportinately see lowered productivity with remote work. (And many of the weak leaders will want their drones back in the hive so they can “monitor” their “productivity”.)

Fourth,

Restaurants happen in clusters and then people say, “Let’s go out to eat” and even if they don’t know where they want to eat they go to the area where all the restaurants are. 

This may have been true in the 80s, but these days with Google Maps and OpenTable, that’s not how it works, at least in my experience. You look on your phone to find a restaurant before you set out in that direction. That’s how we did it together in Washington DC, as well as when we’re traveling to other cities like Nashville or Austin or Las Vegas.

A good restaurant with a good web presence, good pictures on Google, and good reviews could be geographically isolated and do just fine. If we accept his argument that remote work and the internet have completely transformed NYC, then this idea doesn’t hold water for me.

Ultimately, I think the question is “Why live in New York City?” which is one that has puzzled me for years. It’s always seemed patently strange to move somewhere with extremely high cost of living, no space to spread out, and feel jammed in with other people like sardines.

But I know two friends who have moved to New York City, and the appeal seems like some sense of wanting to be connected to things, to be at the beating heart of an urban center, which generates some intrinsic sense of satisfaction. One friend, who was financially independent enough to buy an apartment and live there for years has since moved home and now lives in a similar, but much nicer high-rise apartment in downtown Raleigh. (In other words, it remains to be seen if you actually need to be in New York City to get that sense, or if there is some threshold of metropolis size at which you get nearly all the same benefits.) The second friend went to college in NYC and always dreamed of moving back, but never had the money. At this point, I doubt they ever will, but they have since gotten married and settled down in Raleigh.

Without understanding why people moved to New York City or chose to stay, it’s impossible to say if those things will come back. I have faith though, that where there is demand, supply will re-emerge. And if some things were economically unsustainable and never come back, then that’s fine too.

*click* Well, the lights still work! And it appears that I can post a new article quite easily.

If you look in the lower left corner, you’ll see an Add new site button. So it is still possible to create a new blog for free.

Ben, this is the article that Bob and I were arguing about: NYC IS DEAD FOREVER… HERE’S WHY

Utterly predictable (as evidenced by the fact that I did predict it): three major advertising groups have announced that they will ignore the “Do Not Track” header, because of Microsoft’s decision to enable it by default in IE 10.

How could anyone have failed to see this coming? Advertisers were perfectly willing to honor DNT as long as it was enabled only by the small population of users who care about tracking cookies. Now (at least among IE 10 users) they’d be restricted to tracking only the even tinier population of users who actually volunteer for tracking cookies.

Unless Microsoft changes their decision, they will have effectively killed DNT. The only way to revive it would be to legislatively require that it be honored (and I fully expect Steve Gibson to endorse that approach). The result could fundamentally undermine the viability of current online advertising business models, which could put a lot of Web sites out of business — or force them behind paywalls.

I generally accept the premise that Microsoft is not run by idiots, so I’m baffled by why they would do this, when the consequences were so foreseeable. The only explanation I can think of sounds like a conspiracy theory: perhaps it’s all a ploy to undermine their biggest competitor, Google. Google has a lot more to lose than Microsoft, if advertisers are compelled to respect DNT. Perhaps they know that by forcing the issue, they’ll make legislative action more likely, and by making DNT the default, they’ll be taking money out of Google’s pocket.

At any rate, I’m just glad I don’t use IE. I like targeted advertising.

I can’t decide how to consider this article‘s treatment of the action pistol sports and their enthusiasts: (emphasis mine)

Prosecutor: Road rage killing suspect seen in sharpshooter video

. . .

Now prosecutors say that video of Bowman at a [USPSA] pistol shooting competition in Puyallup may become an important piece of evidence in the case. It shows that he is an excellent shot – hitting one target after another in rapid-fire succession.

. . .

“There’s a concern that somebody who could even, if impulsive, could act this way, presents a danger to the community,” says O’Toole.

Police tell KOMO News they found a so-called “gun room” during Friday’s search of Bowman’s home, filled with bullet-making equipment, ammunition and rifles. They also found evidence he owns at least one handgun.

Obviously there is a certain level of media scare-quoting going on here, but most of it is just reprinting the prosecutor’s fear-mongering. The same fear-mongering that the jury in this guy’s case will be exposed to. Whether or not he’s guilty of murder, it’ll be interesting to see what effect this video of a proficient shooter (the raw video claims he won his division at the local match) has on the case.

Within the action pistol subculture, this guy is more or less average. For someone who shoots as well as he does (in the video, I obviously have no idea about in the alleged murder) the idea that he has a “gun room” with handloading equipment is wholly unsurprising. Hell, I basically fit that description, and so do most competitive shooters I know. Being surrounded by it, it’s easy to forget how scary those kinds of things could be to someone outside the subculture. Media hype around ordering thousands of rounds of ammo online, anyone?

There’s nothing quite like your hobby being identified as a “danger to the community” by someone with the power to end your life as you know it.

Gun pedantry follows:

• The article identifies it as a “sharpshooter video”, but sharpshooter is an IDPA rank, and below his skill level. It should use proper USPSA nomenclature and say “suspect seen in B-class shooter video”. (B-class just a guess based on the video without seeing his hits.)
• A later article says “No handguns were found [in the suspect’s house], but police did find holsters for a 9mm handgun, which may have been used in the killing.” That is almost certainly police press conference nonsense, since most modern guns can be chambered in a number of common calibers (9mm, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP being the most common) and they’d all fit the same holster. And in the video, he’s shooting a .45 ACP 1911. While 1911s can be chambered in 9mm it is certainly a minority of them, so if it was a 1911 holster they found, the logical leap to it being a “holster for a 9mm handgun” is pretty long.

Hat tip: Triangle Tactical